Inspired By Tragedy, Fishbowl Leaders Walk Their Talk

When I walked into Fishbowl Inventory I immediately noticed something unusual for an office: happy people. The reception area features both a ping pong table and a foosball table—each was occupied by employees enthusiastically engaged in play (despite the fact that the ping pong players would obviously not be competing for slots on the Olympic Table Tennis team any time soon).

I was interested in visiting Fishbowl, headed up by a former colleague and friend from the past and fellow Forbes Contributor David K. Williams, who has written about having a “no exit strategy” and encouraging employees to stay with a company for the long haul and what he calls “The 7 Non Negotiables.” Dave, and Fishbowl President Mary Michelle Scott, are iconoclasts who are reinventing the discipline of management.

Dave Williams, Fishbowl CEO working on the Fishbowl Day of Service

As Mary gave me a tour of the office, we interrupted a game of hearts—a 3:00 PM ritual for the newly constituted development team where the Vice President of Technology works as a coder. The daily game, a different member of the team chooses the game to be played every day, serves as a formal part of the team building process at Fishbowl.

As we continued our tour, Mary explained that she and Dave believe that “happy employees make happy products.” They’ve adopted an agile development approach with the Fishbowl take: the central premise is the presumption that everyone is doing the best they can. This attitude encourages people to actually do their best and explicitly accepts that mistakes happen and respects the effort that creates them.

Dave Williams, Chris, and Mary Michelle Scott

It was clear from my interaction with employees, that they actually believe this. Mary and Dave make a point to constantly reinforce the theme that they believe in their team. They trust them. Mary says, “Dave and I never finish anything. We start it and then turn it over to the team because they make it better.”

Many of their employees are young, recent graduates of Utah Valley University. While the school is a fine institution, even in the relatively small state of Utah, the University’s only really remarkable feature is its size; its number of students makes it the largest school in the state. None of the employees was introduced as an Ivy League graduate. Yet the company is growing dramatically and is profitable. Fishbowl is getting the most from its employees.

My primary interest in visiting Fishbowl was to learn about their Courage Above Mountains Foundation—the
CAM Foundation—named for Dave’s late son Cameron, who was one of Fishbowl’s earliest employees. Cameron, sick for 18 months, was belatedly diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancer, such a rare diagnosis in someone his age that it had not been remotely considered until its latest stages. While doctors recommended hospice when the diagnosis was made, the religious Mormon family chose instead to fight for life. Combining faith and prayers with every available treatment they extended Cameron’s life for six months.

After Cam passed away, it was Mary, before joining Fishbowl, who challenged Dave to refocus his grief to do something to create a legacy in Cameron’s name. Dave invited Mary to join Fishbowl and to help him create and run the Courage Above Mountains Foundation. Mary officially joined Fishbowl in January 2011.

Dave Williams leading the charity cycling race, My Reason to Ride, on his "bike."

It is difficult to pin Dave and Mary down when asking them to describe the mission of the CAM Foundation. They simply seek to do whatever they can to make the world a better place, leveraging the available resources. The CAM Center consists largely of surplus space in the Fishbowl offices. Recently, the company through the Foundation, donated 22 computers to the Navajo Nation. Neither Mary or Dave asked the team to do it, but one day Mary discovered that the company engineers were using their daily game time to rehabilitate the old computers, cleaning the hard drives and getting them back into peak shape to be given away.

Dave and Mary, along with Training VP John Erickson, recently wrote about how deadly fear can be in an office. No one at Fishbowl is afraid. Rehabbing old computers for donation might have been viewed in some companies as a distraction (or worse), but at Fishbowl no permission was needed and only praise was given.

Dave confirmed his view that doing service while on the clock inspires employees, “it makes them better people; better people do better work.”

When I arrived at Fishbowl, I was officially greeted by one of the most genuinely kind people I’ve ever met. Marilyn Bigney serves as the Fishbowl receptionist, but is nothing like any receptionist I’ve ever met. She is neither the ditzy twenty-something clueless about what is going on nor the militant middle-aged guard dog I’ve come to expect in the role.

Marilyn, it turns out, has a story. Laid off in 2009 and desperate for new opportunities in 2010, she enrolled in a free class made possible through a coordinated effort among Utah Valley University, an NSF grant and the CAM Foundation. There she received training and got to know some of the Fishbowl people and ended up interviewing to become its receptionist, a job she now executes with the girlish enthusiasm of a cheerleader combined with the polish of an international diplomat.